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Monday, April 18, 2016

Politicians and parties which have spent two decades trying, and failing, to defeat PT in democratic elections triumphantly marched forward to effectively overturn the 2014 vote by removing Dilma on grounds that, as today’s New York Times report makes clear, are, at best, dubious in the extreme. Even The Economist, which has long despised the PT and its anti-poverty programs and which wants Dilma to resign, has argued that “in the absence of proof of criminality, impeachment is unwarranted” and it “looks like a pretext for ousting an unpopular president.”

Sunday’s proceedings, conducted in the name of combatting corruption, were presided over by one of the democratic world’s most blatantly corrupt politicians, House speaker Eduardo Cunha (above, center), who was recently discovered to have stashed millions of dollars in secret Swiss Bank accounts that have no possible non-corrupt source and who lied under oath when he denied to Congressional investigators that he had foreign bank accounts. Of the 594 members of the House, as The Globe and Mail reported yesterday, “318 are under investigation or face charges” while their target, President Rousseff, “herself faces no allegation of financial impropriety.”

What the GOP tried to do to Bill Clinton from day one. Owing to the unpopularity of that move, they decided to just "break" Obama by obstruction.

Anyone see a pattern and where it is emanating from? Democracy is not well.

It is highly likely that the Senate will agree to hear the charges, which will result in the 180-day suspension of Dilma as president and the installation of the pro-business Vice President Michel Temer from the PMDB party. The vice president himself is, as The New York Times put it, “under scrutiny over claims that he was involved in an illegal ethanol purchasing scheme.” Temer recently made it known that one of the leading candidates to head his economic team would be the Chairman of Goldman Sachs in Brazil, Paulo Leme.

Coincidence?

The U.S. has been notably quiet about this tumult in the second-largest county in the hemisphere, and its posture has barely been discussed in the mainstream press. It’s not hard to see why. The U.S. spent years vehemently denying that it had any role in the 1964 military coup that removed Brazil’s elected left-wing government, a coup which resulted in 20 years of a brutal, pro-U.S., right-wing military dictatorship. But secret documents and recordings emerged proving that the U.S. actively helped plot that coup, and the country’s 2014 Truth Commission report documented that the U.S. and U.K. aggressively supported the dictatorship and even “trained Brazilian interrogators in torture techniques.”…

Did you see the movie Brazil?

That U.S-supported coup and military dictatorship looms large over the current controversy. President Rousseff and her supporters explicitly call the attempt to remove her a coup. One prominent pro-impeachment deputado who is expected to run for president, the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro (whom The Intercept profiled last year), yesterday explicitly praised the military dictatorship and pointedly hailed Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dictatorship’s chief torturer (notably responsible for Dilma’s torture). Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, also in the House, said he was casting his impeachment vote “for the military men of ’64″: those who carried out the coup and imposed military rule.

5 comments:

PT is a "moderate left" party only in discourse. In pratice, they are as neoliberal as PSDB, the so called "center right".

You should take care about the side you choose to defend here in this blog - you probably are defending an ideology opposite from yours.

Yesterday's votes were a shame. Unfortunately it seems that I am one of the few brazilians that do not agree with the impeachment. About 60 to 70% agree with that shame. For the less poor people (that are called here "elites") this percentage may be higher, and it's hard to know why.